N O R T H C A R O L I N A N A T I O N A L A S S O C I A T I O N
F O R T H E A D V A N C E M E N T O F C O L O R E D P E O P L E
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P r e s i d e n t , S t a t e C o n f e r e n c e o f B r a n c h e s
M i c h e l l e C o t t o n L a w s
P r e s i d e n t , C h a p e l H i l l - C a r r b o r o B r a n c h 5 6 8 9
News Conference Alert
Thursday, February 25 th
, 10 A. M.
Lincoln Center, 750 S. Merritt Mill Road, Chapel Hill
Speakers will include:
Michelle Laws, CHC NAACP Branch President
Rev. Mark Royster, Chair of the First Blue Ribbon Task Force
Fred Battle, Anderson-Thorpe Breakfast Club President
Tim Tyson, Historian and author of "Blood Done Signed My Name"
Parents and retired educators in the CHCCS District
“Don't Resegregate Our Schools” is the theme of a News Conference to be held on
Thursday morning, at 10 A.M. at the old Lincoln High School, closed when the CHC Schools finally desegregated in 1966. (See Timeline.) About 26 years after this desegregation, some
Black and White educational leaders were able to achieve a critical mass to form the Blue
Ribbon Task Force, to assess the success the school system was having with Black students and other minorities. Rev. Mark Royster chaired the task force and issued the first of a series of reports with recommendations about how to narrow the achievement gap.
Now, 17 years after the first Blue Ribbon Task Force study was completed and presented to the Board of Education, the gap has closed very little. The NAACP says: “Enough talk. It's time to act. It's time to hold people accountable!”
Citing data provided by Supt. Neil Pedersen, and recent actions by the School Board, the NAACP believes that, instead of closing the achievement gap, the CHC School Board and the Pedersen administration are implementing policies that will widen it.
"We are not against raising standards and challenging ALL youth to succeed and excel at high levels. What we are against, however, are policies that expand opportunities for those persons at the top, with little or no genuine attention given to how to bring those children at the bottom along," said Michelle Cotton Laws, President of the Chapel Hill Carrboro NAACP.
“This is not a Black or White issue. This is a Human Issue.”

“We support increasing standards and rigor for all children,” said Laws. “But we strongly oppose creating and putting mechanisms in place that reproduce racial and class inequality, homogeneity in classes and tracking."
"Currently less than 1% of the students enrolled in honors and AP courses in the Chapel
Hill-Carrboro Schools are African American and Latino/Hispanic. African Americans and
Latino/Hispanic kids are disproportionately represented in low level courses, with no evidence to suggest that many of them can not compete with the proper instruction at high levels. We object to the decision to expand honors courses at the high school level, with no clear plan on how to hold teachers accountable for ensuring that biased selection into honors and AP courses is prevented. We object to the great attention given to students on one end without similar attention giving to implementing best teaching practices that prepare ALL children to compete at a high level. It is far too similar to the racist notions that undergirded the "separate but equal" doctrine. We will not stand by and watch our schools become resegregated inside their halls, by class and race. We are on the verge of educational apartheid. We believe we are capable of innovative cutting edge education that prepares ALL children to be competitive in the global market place beyond high school."
"No one race or class of people holds a higher premium than any other on the education and wellbeing of their children. We all want our children to succeed. It is a well known fact that, in the African American community, education is considered ‘the great equalizer’ and the best path to upward social mobility. This is part of our heritage. It is about expectations and what happens to children when they come into contact with teachers and a system that doesn't believe they can learn with high standards and rigorous instruction.”
NO! to injudicious school board actions!
NO! to tracking our children!
NO! to stratification based upon race and class!
NO! to exclusion based upon privilege and social status!
We will NOT create a private school system with taxpayer's dollars!
In every language and according to the moral compass of every race and ethnic group
Separate is NOT Equal!
NAACP is calling for the Chapel Hill/Carrboro School Board and Administration to:
1.
Not fund an expansion of the honors courses until a plan is in place, NOT PROPOSED, to ensure that African American and Latino/Hispanic students, as well as economically disadvantaged students, will be identified early, prepared for enrollment and recruited into honors courses.

2.
Report immediately to the community, at large, on the progress the District has made in meeting recommendations of The Blue Ribbon Task Force as proposed in 1993 and subsequent years prior to its dismantling in 2000.
3.
Provide a report within 30 days that reflects the ten year trend of students identified by race and gender that enroll in AP and honors courses AND report on the mechanism or process by which students are currently identified for honors and AP courses.
4.
Increase and enforce better teacher accountability. Identify the teachers who have had success at educating and preparing ALL students to succeed and perform well and have them take the lead in developing plans and the PLC for that grade level AND those teachers who, consistently over time, have not performed well educating at a rigorous and highly proficient manner African American and Latino/Hispanic children should have their positions reevaluated.
5.
Beginning with the 2010/2011 school year, link teacher performance standards, bonuses and merit pay to INDIVIDUAL students’ achievement, not merely aggregate or across the board.
If a teacher is having success with only one group of students, that teacher should NOT merit bonuses or good performance ratings.
6.
Re-explore and begin to ENACT without haste, models in education that do not track students and respects the gifts and unique abilities of every child.
7.
Bring all courses up to the standards identified by the State as Honors level pedagogy; do not create a three-tier curriculum based on ability tracking.
8.
Eliminate the notion that this is a private school system—PERIOD! All community members should be able to reap the benefits of and gain access to school resources without intense labor or arduous struggle. All parents should feel welcomed and included without regard to race or class. Starting from the administration level to the individual schools,
Create a culture that reaches and includes ALL parents in the educational process of their child.
9.
Make African American History (including the African Diaspora) at the middle school level
(8 th
grade) a prerequisite to World History AND incorporate the local rich history of African
Americans in Chapel Hill and Carrboro as early as grade 4; link and make a core part of the curriculum for all students the civil rights history of the African American community to that of other ethnic groups including the Jewish Holocaust and Latina /Hispanic/ migrant movement.

The NAACP gratefully acknowledges the research and general historical timeline that School
Board Member Mia Day Burroughs created with help from Michael McElreath, James Leloudis,
Valerie Foushee, Marilyn Luby, Traci Davenport, Harry McKeon, Jerry Cohen, Susan Worley,
Doug Eyre, Patrick Winn, Stephanie Knott, Donna Wyatt, Robin Nucilli and Neil Pedersen.
1902: Chapel Hill Public School opened near where the Carolina Inn is now. It excluded all
Black students, although Chapel Hill's population at the time was 30-40% Black.
1909: Chapel Hill Graded-School District, excluding all Black Students, was Chartered by
N.C.
General Assembly, allowing the Town to tax its citizens, Black and White, plus receive tax monies from Orange County and the State. No charter or taxes were allocated for Black students, who at that time constituted about 30-40% of the Chapel Hill population but had no public schools within the City.
1916: Chapel Hill built a new school, excluding Black students, where University Square is.
1890-1924: In 1890, Quakers opened a private school serving Black students where St. Paul
A.M.E. Church is. Rev. L.H. Hackney led a private school for Black students from 1898-1912, and then opened the Industrial and Education Institute, where the present Lincoln Center is, across the road from the Town limits. In 1916 it became part of the Orange County segregated school system, and was called the Orange County Training School. It burned down 6 years later.
1924: Mr. Henry Stroud donated land to rebuild the OCTS and the County and Rosenwald
Fund paid for the building. Orange County taxes paid Black teachers (substantially less than their white counterparts made) and the operating costs. Most of the Black students and their families were trained to take cleaning, cooking, laundry and other menial jobs at the University or doing day work for faculty families.
1930-1954: The NAACP legal team, under the leadership of Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, began chipping away at the Separate But (Un)Equal Doctrine that served to justify the inhuman treatment of Black people in the segregated South. While
NAACP cases were being brought up through the courts, the University and the Chapel
Hill School Board continued to build new schools, and to make cosmetic changes to the
Black Schools. For example, in 1948 OCTS changed its name to Lincoln H.S. And in 1953,
Glenwood Elementary School opened off Highway 54, excluding Black Students.
1954: The U.S. Supreme Court declared Chapel Hill's school system (and all other segregated systems) illegal and unconstitutional. The court reasoned that despite the equalization of the schools by "objective" factors (new buildings, etc., such as Lincoln H.S.), intangible issues foster and maintain inequality. Racial segregation in public education has a detrimental effect on Black

children. Excluding them is a sign that the larger society believes they are inferior. “Separate but equal is inherently unequal in the context of public education.”
1954-1966: Chapel Hill openly operated its schools in violation of the NAACP's victory in the
Court. Among the illegal acts of the Chapel Hill schools was the rejection of Mr. Preston R.
Weaver's request to send his son, James Vernon, to the Chapel Hill Elementary School near University Square, in 1957. A year later, Chapel Hill Schools opened a new school,
Estes Hills Elementary, illegally excluding Black Students. In 1959 the Board rejected
Stanley Vickers request to transfer to a school that illegally excluded him.
Although there were tiny steps taken to tokenly integrate, and the School Board itself had a
4-3 majority to take tiny steps toward desegregation in 1961, the CH Schools still opened a
“colored school”--Frank Porter Graham—in 1962, eight years after that was ruled unconstitutional. By 1963, about 160 of the almost 1200 Black students in the Chapel Hill
District attended integrated schools—over 85% of Blacks were still attending segregated schools.
1966: Chapel Hill High School opened, serving all high school students in the district. For two years, Lincoln was the home for Black 4th-6 th
graders, and then it was closed. Like most
Southern counties, this Place—with so much history and meaning to the Black Community— was shuttered as a school.
1967-1990: To Quote Board Member Burroughs: “ School district lines were redrawn to assign approximately equal percentages of black and white students in the district's elementary schools. This effort, the first of its kind in North Carolina, eliminated racially identifiable schools in the district. This was not the end of the challenges of local school integration, however.
Students, faculty, administrators and parents continued to struggle with the loss and/or merger of school traditions, demotions of former leaders of the all-Black schools, continued individual prejudices and fear of the unknown.”